Question for an essay about clinical tone

Question for an essay about clinical tone

CamaradeAlbabar 03 May 2025 11:30

Hello dear readers, authors, and lurkers of the Backrooms Wiki. I am currently writing an essay about the clinical tone, which leads me to ask the following question:

What is your definition of the clinical tone?

Give me your honest answer, develop it as much as you desire. I will attempt to use your answers for a section of that essay.

To those who will contribute, thank you.

Re: Question for an essay about clinical tone

Endrew1 03 May 2025 16:23

Here's my two cents

Clinical: a writing tone which is information-based rather than emotionally charged. Something you would find to be fitting for academic articles, explanatory documents, safety protocols, guidelines, etc. For example a Wikipedia article over a romance novel or a diary. The main goal is to describe, explain, advise, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't also evoke feelings or create vivid ambiences.

There are some general rules (which can be bent and broken too)

• Impersonal writing style: no direct references to you, I, we…
• Neutral voice: no exclamation points or subjective, emotional interjections by the author
• Avoids statements with 100% certainty: treats the content as ongoing research that may be corrected or expanded upon in the future, this leads to lots of "seemingly" "theorized to be" "most likely" in descriptions lol
• Can work with both short, precise, more technical lingo as well as more flowery and eloquent language tbh.

Re: Question for an essay about clinical tone

InspectingCritters 18 May 2025 13:19

Wow. I thought more people would have responded to this. Apologies for being so late, but I've decided I want to take a crack at answering this.

I feel that, for me, the epitome(?) of clinical description is straightforward description that says a lot in little words. I don't mean this in the sense of simple words and short, easily-digestible sentences, I mean that it is impersonal and matter-of-fact; it does not meander; it does not fancy its descriptions, or make clunkily long sentences in layman terms. It is clear and concise, has a goal, and gets the job done.